Limits on Team Hours

[hg273]

Hi All,

Team 1540 takes pride in being a student-managed team and producing a 100% student-designed and built robot. Recently, our school enacted a policy regarding the amount of time that students could have for homework and extracurricular activities. For this last build season, the policy did not impact the robotics program, and certain team members (myself included), racked up huge amounts of hours to finish the robot in 6 weeks. The administration caught wind of it, and was slightly concerned that students were putting 2, 3, 400 hours into robotics over a 6 week period of time. We were recently presented with a proposal that would not let a student into the robotics lab if he/she broke 200 hours over the 6 week build season. Additionally, the lab would be open from 3-6:30 on any school night, and only until 10 on weekends. My friends and I are concerned about how this may affect our build for next season. While there are many things we can do to distribute the hours, distributing tasks, training more new members etc. there are certain things that require some key members to put in large amounts of time.

I was wondering if other teams have statistics about the average and median amount of hours committed by team members over the build season. Anecdotes would work too. What I'm looking for are things that I, and my team, can take to our administration to see if we can amend the policy before it goes into effect for next year's build season. Also, if anyone has any past experience with situations similar to this, anything would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!